Moms upset about Facebook deleting photos of breast feeding

Several hundred women around the world are upset with Facebook employees for being, well, boobs when it comes to the company’s policy of posting breast-feeding pictures.

To voice their displeasure, the women will be protesting Monday by staging “nurse-ins” — they’ll be breast feeding their children outside the social media giant’s offices worldwide, including outside its Menlo Park headquarters.

The issue lies with Facebook’s photo policy. Many mothers will post pictures of them breast feeding their children, only to have those photos flagged and their accounts suspended.

Facebook allows its users to flag photos they believe are inappropriate. Employees go through the flagged photos and remove the ones that actually violate the Statement of Rights and Responsibilities — a set of standards that follows pretty much the same rules as television and print media.

But even though Facebook has issued a statement stating that breast-feeding photos are not inappropriate, every once in a while, employees will remove flagged photos of mothers breast feeding.

For Vancouver mother Emma Kwasnica, a breast-feeding advocate and a protest organizer, the sour milk for her began in 2007, when she joined Facebook. In the five years she’s had an account, she has had about 30 of her photos flagged as inappropriate and her account shut down four times — once for 30 days.

“This is discrimination,” she said. “There’s no other way to look at it. We’re being treated as pornographers. Breast-feeding moms, especially ones with infants, spend hours a day with their children at their breast. They’re not trying to be sexually explicit. This is just part of their everyday lives.”

Facebook policy states that as long as the photos do not contain “an exposed breast where the child is not activengaged in nursing,” they are not inappropriate. However, users can flag any photo as inappropriate, and it’s up to Facebook employees to decide what is and what isn’t.

A spokeswoman for the company said the removal of breast-feeding photos is in no way malicious — just an honest mistake that happens when dealing with sheer volume of photos that come in each day.

“In the course of processing billions of photographs and millions of reports each day, human error does occasionally occur,” said the spokeswoman, who did not want to be identified.

Kwasnica, who has three daughters, said she thinks Facebook employees should undergo sensitivity training to prevent these errors from happening.

While Facebook apologized to her publicly about two weeks ago for removing her photos, mothers around the world are still finding their accounts frozen and their breastfeeding photos removed, she said.

“People ask, ‘Why do you share it on Facebook?’ and I say, ‘Why do you share anything on Facebook?’ ” Kwasnica said. “People share their whole days on Facebook, when they’re eating, where they’re eating, pictures of them feeding their kids spaghetti. We just see this as feeding our children.”